A Handy Guide to Trial of Ascension – What You Need To Know

The Trial of Ascension is a challenging tower in Summoners War with three difficulty levels: Normal, Hard and Hell. ToA Normal and Hard have 100 floors to complete. You’ll need to fight against different monsters to get to the 100^th floor. Once you’ve made it to the 100^th floor, you’ll face the final boss. After the defeat of the boss you’ve cleared the whole tower.

There’s also a “Hell” mode with just 10 floors. The name is pretty fitting, though, because you need specific monsters for each floor and strong runes. The monsters on these floors are much stronger, tankier and have more resistance. Furthermore each floor has its own monthly rotation and goals you need to complete to get more rewards for example: the enemies are immune to attack bar and/or cooldown increasing/decreasing effects, you cannot heal and recover or increased critical damage by 200%.

You see ToA Hell isn’t easy and is more for endgamers. The rewards are pretty good and you can focus on ToA Hell if you can complete ToA Normal and Hard every month with minimal effort and have the specific monsters for it. Every month lots of summoners will share their teams on Reddit, Discord or Youtube and help others which team is the best for each floor.

Generally ToA is really important and resets every 15^th of each month. A lot of rewards are awaiting you in the different floors. Even as a beginner, it’s crucial to start with ToA Normal and Hard as soon as possible to get the rewards and make progress.

Pro tip: At the end of each month, there will be a free entry event (lasting an hour), so you won’t have to use your Energy to clear the ToA stages. This event will be announced in the events section of the game.

In this article we’ll go over the key steps for completing ToA Normal and Hard mode.

Rewards overview

Stage	Rewards
Every common stage	1x Engraved Summoning Piece
Every 5 stages	Crystals
Stage 10	50x Energy
Stage 20	1x 4-star Rainbowmon
Stage 30	1x Mystical Scroll
Stage 40	100x Crystals
Stage 50	2x Mystical Scroll
Stage 60	1x 5-star Rainbowmon
Stage 70	1x Devilmon
Stage 80	300x Crystals
Stage 90	1x Light & Darkness Scroll
Stage 100	1x Legendary Scroll (Normal) 1x All-Attribute Scroll (Hard)

Continuous Damage

Continuous Damage is the real MVP of Trial of Ascension. When you’re facing off against five monsters, all of which looking for a taste of your team’s blood, you’ll learn that the best way to win in Trial of Ascension is to kill them quickly. One of those ways that’s recommended is Continuous Damage. For a certain amount of turns, the enemy’s HP will be decreased by 5% of their Max HP. Veromos is a pretty sweet source of DoTs (or Damage Over Time) but the main sources of DoTs that most people turn to in Trial of Ascension are monsters like Mellia and Sath.

Attack Bars

Attack bar manipulation is another thing that people do when it comes to Trial of Ascension. I cannot believe it took me well over a year to understand what the heck attack bars do, so I’m going to explain it to you all so that you don’t make the same mistakes I do. Attack bars, the little blue bars under the monster’s HP bar, basically tell when monsters get their turns or not. Speed is what determines how fast the attack bar fills up, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t push back the attack bar meter, or even completely reset it; meaning it could take even longer for the enemy to get their turn.

There are five monsters on the first two stages of each Trial of Ascension floor, and then the third floor is whatever is shown on the team selection screen. Each monster, unless they have a passive that specifically says they’re immune to attack bar manipulation (which includes Akroma,) can easily have their attack bars reset; preventing them from attacking your monsters. Tyron, the Water Sylph can reduce the attack bar of all enemies under the decrease attack speed effect.

Stuns and Freezes (Inability effects)

Another staple in Trial of Ascension; stuns and freezes, unless somehow cleansed, will prevent monsters from moving until their next turn. This is why monsters with AoE attacks and are on Despair runes are great, because they can stun multiple people at once.

Trial of Ascension Teams

For ToA you can use F2P monsters which have the skills from above, can heal or make damage. Basically you can use your first monsters you get from Summoners Way, Secret Dungeons or Fusions.

Good free to play monsters are:

If you are lucky and got some nice Natural 5 star monsters, you can use these in ToA as well:

Make sure to have a good combination of Dots, Inability effects like Stuns or Freezes, Attack Bar decreasing effects, Damage and Heal.

There are different bosses in between on every 10^th floor. The team of Tyron, Loren, Fran, Spectra and Verdehile is the best here, because Loren defense breaks the boss and Spectra makes the most damage with his second skill. Tyron freezes the other enemies around the boss, while Fran provides heal and attack buff and Verdehile pushes the attack bar of the whole team.

For the Akroma stage we recommend to place Garo, the Fire Ninja in your team. Due to his passive he can’t be killed by the Akromas.

Once you get to the 100^th floor you will face the end boss, either Ath’taros or Lyrith. It depends on the monthly rotation. Again the team of Tyron, Loren, Fran, Spectra and Verdehile should easily kill the bosses.

Pro tip for Ath’taros:

You can focus the boss for damage and use your AoE skills from Tyron or Verad and Spectra to control the left and right crystals next to the boss.

When Loren lands the defense break, you can deal great damage with Spectras 2nd skill.

Pro tip for Lyrith:

This boss can be more challenging, and you need to keep an eye on the different auras (colors) of the boss and it’s incarnations:

green = absorbs and recover up to 25% of the attack bar when attacked
red = counterattacks with ‘Mind Break’ when attacked
blue = increases the defense significantly

Try to keep the attack bar of the boss low and kill the incarnations. Your best chances are, if the boss is blue, so if you don’t get it on your first try, don’t give up and try again!